Qumulo co-founder and CTO Peter Godman has left the company

Peter Godman, co-founder and chief technology officer at storage startup Qumulo, is no longer with the company, GeekWire has learned.

Qumulo confirmed Godman’s departure in a statement from CEO Bill Richter, which did not get into details. “On behalf of the whole team here at Qumulo, I want to thank him and wish him the best on a well deserved break, time with his family and his next adventure,” Richter said in the statement, after employees at its Seattle headquarters were told Tuesday that Godman was out.

A Qumulo representative said Godman’s departure was expected, and that a transition plan was being put into place.

Godman was the founding CEO of Qumulo in 2012, moving over to CTO when Richter joined the company in 2016. Qumulo’s storage systems are designed for customers that need to store huge amounts of files, and in the past companies buying this kind of storage have found it difficult to scale as their businesses grow. That led to the development of the Qumulo File Fabric, which runs on custom Qumulo hardware, hardware from HPE, and on Amazon Web Services.

Qumulo introduced the cloud-based version of its product just last year, and AWS already offers its own file-storage cloud service. Godman told me last year that Qumulo’s service was better at scaling than AWS, and the trend toward hybrid cloud strategies works in the company’s favor, but fewer and fewer companies are ordering hardware for data centers these days.

[Editor’s note: This post was updated with comment from a Qumulo representative.]

Tom Krazit, GeekWire's Cloud & Enterprise Editor, covered technology for news organizations including IDG, CNET, and paidContent before serving as executive editor of Gigaom and the Structure conference series. Reach him at tom@geekwire.com and follow him @tomkrazit.

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